A Thing Shared
Automat Collective
Philadelphia, PA
September - October, 2022
group show curated by Tess Wei
In 2005, the fish factory of Stodvarfjordur, Iceland was forced to shut down. During its operation, the factory’s main purpose was to gut the porski (cod) caught by the local trawler, Kambarostin - removing the entrails (the “waste”) and preparing the fish for market. This process of evisceration leaves behind a residue of the unfavorable, unmarketable body: intestines, organs, large veins.. To eviscerate comes from the Latin, eviscerare. This word refers to the violence of physical disembowelment, but can also describe the amorphous act of depriving something of its most important quality. It would not surprise me if the only thing that would connect everything in the end would be this potent smell and this strange taste documents an attempt to locate sites where the collective memory of Stodvarfjordur’s fishing culture has embedded itself, slipped away, become warped, preserved, re-imagined, and slowly fermented. Even evisceration leaves a trace: the strange somatic slime, the excretions of site-specific history, necessary residues of ephemerality. What can children who were not alive during the factory’s operation, a mountain, or metal tubing remember? How does memory surpass linguistic form and, perhaps, become activated by encounters with material? And how can ritual and corporeal gestures, acts which are ephemeral in nature, facilitate such remembering? To begin understanding these inquiries, we worked with a traditional fermen- tation process to create a sauce from fish guts - known as garum - and involved local school children, as well as ourselves, in the methodology of ritual. The metaphorical evisceration of Stodvarfjordur has creat- ed real vulnerability through a dispossession of peripheral folk knowledge by the privileging of in- dustrial uniformity. In recognition of the damage done by this slow violence, we observe the salience of both gut- ting as a charged action and of the residue of guts, whose very removal sustained the town of Stodvarfjordur’s human and non-human life.